Suellen Symons

Time and Sensibility

Polarities: time and sensibility
text by Gina Fairley

As Australians, the narrative of the figure in the land-scape is embedded in our psyche. It is a timeless meditation that dwells in both reality and mythology. It is a collective memory nurtured through the paintings of Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts, for example, images that inserted the body into the overwhelming scale of our landscape with a kind of melancholic isolation. This bodily disjuncture was further played out by Sidney Long and Normal Lindsay, artists who overlaid this bush folklore with a sirenesque mystery, their tone or sensibility fused reality with fantasy. It was an exotic lament picked up by Peter Weir in his equally iconic film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and, indeed, a sentiment updated in these images by Suellen Symons.

While there is a seeming polarity between these two photographic series, they offer two sides to a very focused consideration. Symons explains, ‘one places the multiple portrait in the landscape while the other shows multiple views of the landscape.’ In the first, her Portrait Series, landscape and architecture act as a frame within which to construct or contain a narrative. She explores how the body becomes part of the landscape, part of its story. In her Panorama Series she narrows our vision, the horizontal format extending a sense of vastness and isolation. Again, we fall into the magic of these scapes yet retain a fractured or unsettled relationship with them. Both series probe how we read landscape as a meter of time.

Her Panorama Series similarly explores our reading of time but in direct contrast to her portraits that are fluid. Time is almost frozen here. Compressed into a narrow zip, they hone our perceptions - our visual and psychological reading of landscape - focussing us on the vacant detail and emotions conveyed. They are extremely poetic fragments. If we were again to turn to the baggage we carry from Australian art history, there is an undeniable conversation with the small horizontal landscapes of Charles Condor, Tom Roberts and JJ Hilder, for example, those romantic atmospheric studies that are all about light, air, and the framing of a landscape’s essence. Symons takes this language of painting and melds it with the DNA of her own land-scape and photography’s traditions, from documentary-based work, to land art, to contemporary photomedia, finding new modes of expression in her practice.

 (this is an extract from Gina Fairley’s catalogue essay)

Exhibition Catalogue written by Gina Fairley

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